Kindness is underrated. We could always use more of it. We tend to worship visionaries and creative people (like Steve Jobs and Pablo Picasso) and elevate them to the status of gods, even though they were often assholes (like Steve Jobs and Pablo Picasso). Stop praising the jerks. It reinforces bad behaviour (all the parents in the house know this).
via http://www.marcjohns.com/
I have been looking at this guys illustrations for the past year and it surprises me that I am yet to remark on them. This particular drawing caught my eye. Perhaps because it's Christmas time, a holiday I always enjoy or that I have been grappling with return to work syndrome, that I have been thinking about being kinder of late.
A teaching environment can be a brutal one and often all your energy is exhausted in being the person that a teacher should be. Kind, patient, supportive, being a bit wise at times always helps, so when it gets to the end of the day your kindness quota can feel somewhat depleted. The adminstrative part of a teachers job is also ever expanding and is a little heartless and often out of synch with what we are trying to achieve. It's extremely difficult to be zen about issues that matter so much.
I spent a year with my new son, gazing at him, marvelling at first steps and the like. Returning to work was, well, a bit of a shock. The teaching was great but I've always ironically taken issue with being told what to do, particularly when I have difficulty in making sense of the logic. So I found myself getting increasingly annoyed and my mood being, well somewhat unkind. Unkind to myself, my husband and at times a random stranger in the supermarket.
Grumpy isn't that awesome and often needs a paradigm shift of thought to help you out of it. I find at times my pithy sense of humour, which is certainly leaning toward the sarcastic, can get me in trouble. I also often find myself surrounded by lovely people who are phenomenally different to myself, which can also mean that the sarcasm can often be misconstrued.
In an effort to pull myself out of the grumpy hole, which is really quite difficult when you find yourself in it. I have been attempting to just shifted myself slightly. My morning drive to drop my son at daycare is right near the beach. Finding ourselves with a spare 10 mintues, I have been making the effort to scoop up the 12kgs that is my one year old and walk across the park just far enough so that we can see the ocean and breath in some salty air. It is only brief, just a few minutes before my boy starts to wriggle and wonder what we are doing but it's enough to make me feel connected to something bigger than the petty little world I can sometime find myself looped in.
It is a moment just for us where we stop. This is a feeling that is rare in a life that seems to be moving at a neck breaking pace in a direction that I am uncertain of. So I'd like to wear this little illustration as a talsiman of sorts, to remind myself to stop and look at the ocean once in a while and be kind to myself, my family and random people in the supermarket.
